My usual 8 hour Pandora session at work was replaced today with an 8 plus hour NPR session. Yep, even NPR has an app for Android. Move the eff over iPhone…this sucker is gunning for you.

Many moons ago, I heard through the grapevine that slow sites are penalized by search engines. Being the owner of a fast-as-lightning-bro-you-better-get-your-Nikes-bro site, I didn’t care. After plugging into the world of php, jquery, css, html, and a boat load of 3rd party crap on ol’ swantron.com, I have a slow site. Waah. (Hint: that ampersand in front up there ^ means Twitter) Looking into the cause of my crappy speed numbers, the first culprit was my stupid “poll” plugin that I have been using. Nobody cares about the polls on a site, unless they have exhausted every other iota of content on said site. Not the case here. Not the case by a long shot. I do have some content that is popping in the search engines, however. Tons of impressions, in fact. I am lacking the placement, even on swantron-specific terms. Maybe my lean-and-mean approach will win me SEO gold, readership silver, and living off of saying dumb shit bronze. Maybe. Polls are officially off line until the jury has deliberated.

Them shits is off the blazin meter… Yep. Big fan.

I am now an official Android fanboi. It would be impossible to hide that fact. Granted, I have yet to root my Droid 2, but I am at least ninety something out of a possible one hundred ‘big into’ this OS. Pretty pumped I waited for Snapdragon…pretty pumped I feigned the urge to get a first generation device…pretty pumped that Apple and or AT&T are not around my neck of the woods…you name it. I’m in a good place, cellularly. +1 use of the word ‘cellularly’ Regardless, I am left with the problem of what to do with all of my passé phones. +1 tilde I have a stack of Verizon phones sitting around, with very little use. Zero use, in fact, unless you can count ’looking at and laughing about how ridiculously horrid technology was two years ago’ a use, which in fact I do not. Good thing I found a site that will give you money for your mobile phone. Not just a bit, either. That is, of course, unless you are still rocking the Zach Morris phone: Damn right A.C. is going to sit backwards in his chair, Preppy. You know what is cool about SellMyMobile? Not only will they give you money for your cell, but they are saving the environment as well. My old Blackberry may not be as worth as much as the big hitters (iPhone, iPad, Nokia N8, etc.) but it will at very least stay out of a landfill. There are some toxins in that sucker…gold too, but also toxins. Hit that bump up there to see what I’m talking about. Worth a shot, especially if you have a sweet phone that you are looking to monetize. Reduce, Reuse, Monetize. I think.

The proof is in the pudding (or in the froyo?) on this guy. Droid 2, hands down. Sorry Nexus fans. I ran a benchmark test on my Droid 2 running Froyo. Here are the results, in slick, colorful, sideways bar graph form. Sorry for the awful picture quality…I had to log into my dual boot, in order to use Dell Webcam Central (garbage) to snap a picture of my phone. Turns out, my phone is also my camera, and I have yet to grab a screenshot app. Whatever. I’ll summarize the results. Droid 2 with Froyo —— 1384 units Nexus One 2.2 ——————— fewer unit than 1384 Others Played ——————– far fewer units than even 1384 Not sure what these units are, really, but the Droid 2 is clearly superior. I used an app called Quadrant, which is alleged to be quite legit. It surprised me that the Droid X is lagging behind 2.2+ that much…it was supposed to be hotter than Hades. The Samsung Galaxy S is making a solid case for itself, sitting well above the Nexus One and HTC Desire. As for those on the Moto Droid…hang in there. Hopefully you can manage to break your phone under warranty and get something with the Snapdragon under the hood. ****Bonus Bloggage…after I snapped the above picture and put together this post, I knuckled up on the Widowmaker pictured in the background. My knuckles indicate that I once again lost.****

Guess what back to school means to me…a longer commute to and from work. Dodging coeds isn’t as fun as it sounds. Well, maybe cutting extremely close to bikers is fun. Actually, that is very fun. The only real bonus to this time of year is for the barn-burner sales that pop up for technology aimed at students. If there is any chance that a college bound dude or dudette will be shopping for a tech item of some sort, chances are high that that item will be super cheap, somewhere. Case in point…how about some discounts at HP (say what you will…I still want one of those damned HPs with the flip around screen…badly) I was poking around Savings.com, and noticed that they have all sorts of deals that are aimed at students. Free shipping and all sorts of discounts on HP notebooks, ink, you name it. They also had some deals from Verizon regarding Droid phones and $50 off. I’m somewhat upset that I bought my Droid 2 without checking out the back to school deals. Anyhow, hit that link to see what I’m talking about. I’ll be playing with my phone, and wishing I was playing with a picture of my phone on my swivelly HP netbook.

This is not a chipper tale of how-to boastery. Far from it. I cartoonified the shit out of the following pics, in order to further convey the surreal darkness that was involved in this seemingly trivial task. Buckle up…it is not likely to be pleasant blog-reading. The mission objective was simple enough: hang a heavy bag. The mission-turns-out-to-be-a-little-cooler-and-a-little-more-involved moment came when I realized there was approximately one punching bag length between the ceiling in my garage and the spot where I wanted the top of said bag. I’ll let the pictures tell the story, for the most part. My knuckles are all sorts of funked up, which is an indication of the title’s eventual success. Or aptness. Or giant fail…I’m still very confused. Enough rambling…first thing I know, I’m standing on my Honda Trail 90, wondering how I ended up with a heavy bag (and Honda Trail 90) before I managed to end up with a goddamned ladder. When in Rome…snap a pic. It’s pretty much all about the photo-documentation at this point. “Uh” is incredibly right. That sucker was bouncing around looking down…not so stable when my arm and or both arms were above my head. Good thing I’m limber. Huh? My grand idea involved two threaded rings. Innocent enough looking… …fucking wrong. Far from innocent, when said threaded ring is dropped into spider-central… Well, I managed to knock most of those webs out of place with my trusty framing hammer. Unfortunately, I knocked them right on that stupid shiny thing I was attemping to arm-fish out of the hole between the particle board, studs, spider poop, drywall, and darkest hell. I got the stupid thing, did the weird shudder thing with my shoulders/neck for a half-minute, and got back into gear. Survival mode at this point. Darkest-hell-been-and-back-survival mode. Either my creeped out spider dance brought me luck, or my engineering was sound. Or both…but it worked out, against most odds. It works, and there is a box of delicious OML in the frame. So I guess I’ll count that as a win???

Tending bar was easy money. Hang on for a sec…I’ll get to it, via a roundabout, Android laden path. As a new Droid 2 owner, I’m all about my apps. You know what? There are a lot of awful apps floating around the market place and or webs. There are some incredibly useful apps, both free and for purchase. I have purchased but one Android app so far…and I’m not embarrassed in the least to say that it is the paid version of Robo Defence. It both kicks ass at home, and at the job. In fact, I can barely make it through a meeting, that is, if I drop the ball and leave GPS rolling and nuke my battery, rendering my phone useless for a half-hour-turned-into-seventy-horrible-minutes-of-repeating-the-same-crap-from-the-last-twelve-emails. I mean meetings. I mean, I wish I could use my phone at work. But, I digress. I like apps. Wouldn’t it be great, if there was some sort of app out there, that would pay you. Sit down, y’all…there is. Mobile plus marketing equals mobile marketing. Getting paid to play, in a nutshell. This has been an incredibly long-winded intro to an easily summed-up moral of the story. I really think that WeReward has hit the nail on the head, and created the easiest means of making money I have ever encountered. Granted, I have tended a lot of bar, which is both easy and simultaneously a giant pain in the ass. How about getting paid to check into an advertiser’s place of business? Sounds okay…right? Hear an ad, respond to add, do nothing more, get some loot. Not too shabby. I caught a video on a Fox affiliate about these guys and an iPhone app. Basically, they were pulling fifty bucks a month for taking pictures from some places that popped up on their phones. They have the same stuff for we Android users, and will have you RIM suckers covered in no time. Hit that link above for some more info…it is pretty slick.

Wheat Thins are boring, by design. What is a guy to do, when at work with a bunch of boring-ass W Thins? Easy. Arrange the hell out of the stupid little things and hot snauce them up. Hot snauce the crap out of them. Here, I went for a crude lobster formation. If you get a little crazy with said hot snauce, don’t worry. I spent the rest of my afternoon with a small red snauce stain on my yellow notepad. Either my co-workers failed to notice, or thought I was crazy and avoided a rambling culinary pep talk. +1 Spicy

One week into my tenure as a happy Droid user, I have some insight into what an Android user must toss on his or her unit. This is a running list, of course, but solid enough for a post. Post and a pic… I’ll keep it simple at this point. Top five apps I have encountered, as far as usefulness and coolness are concerned. 1) Advanced Task Killer. No questions asked…get this app first and foremost. The battery life on these suckers is awful at best. Multitasking is great, but murder on batteries. Nuke your background crap, and nuke it often. Nuke it from orbit, if in orbit. 2) Google Sky Map. So awesome it hurts. Bonus: your non-Android-having buddies will bow to your phone’s awesomeness. 3) Google Translate. Como se dice ‘awesome’ en Espanol? Un momento…Impresionante. Get this app, amigos. 4) Robo Defence. Awesome game; good graphics. Perfect for meetings; free version for those non-committal types. 5) Google Goggles. Take pictures of junk, see search results. This is another deal-breaker when it comes to the new tech that you can pull out on these phones. Maybe I’ll post a few result sets of this guy in action…sort of like looking into the future with this guy. As the forewarning stated, this is far from a static list…merely a snapshot of the stuff I am currently digging with a spoon. I’ll try to keep some updates on the site, when my knowledge and tastes mature. FWIW, get one of these bad boys. You will most surely not regret it in the least. To the max.